Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/29

 INTRODUCTION. XXI

I have thus, at the risk of trying the patience of the reader, given a very imperfect summary of what the years immediately preceding and including those in which our author was growing up produced in the way of writers. It must not be forgotten either, that it was in the early part of this century that the circulation of the blood was discovered by Dr. Harvey, and logarithms were introduced by Na- pier ; creating new eras in medicine and mathematics. In such an age of literary activity, Mrs. Bradstreet passed the first eighteen years of her life. With literary tastes and the advantages which, without doubt, she enjoyed at the Earl of Lincoln's castle of Sempringham, she must have felt, and, at the same time, been able easily to satisfy, a craving for poetical and historical studies. It should be remem- bered, however, that she was only eighteen when she was called to leave her native country, with its manifold attrac- tions, and her pleasant home, with its tender associations, to take up her abode in a wilderness. Even then she would be exposed to all the cares consequent upon her position as a wife, and that, too, the wife of a busy magistrate who was frequently called to be absent from home, leaving her no solace except her meditations on what she had once read or experienced.

At the early age of sixteen, she was married to Simon Bradstreet, the son of a Nonconformist minister of the same name, of Lincolnshire. Bradstreet's father was the son of a well-to-do Suffolk gentleman, was one of the first Fel- lows of Emmanuel College, had preached at Middleburgh, in the Netherlands, and was, like Dudley, a friend of the Rev. Mr. Cotton and Dr. Preston. Young Bradstreet was born at Horbling, March, 1603, and was educated at the

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